Everything is Flowing

Blue Marble

It is poetically fitting that the earth rotates and circumnavigates because our habitation of the Blue Marble is a continuous loop of natural and spontaneous change.

Anything that appears static, stationary, or unchanging is not observed over a time-scale that revels its metamorphic journey.

John Muir wrote that everything, animal or rock, is going somewhere.

"Everything is flowing -- going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. Thus the snow flows fast or slow in grand beauty-making glaciers and avalanches; the air in majestic floods carrying minerals, plant leaves, seeds, spores, with streams of music and fragrance; water streams carrying rocks...While the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood in Nature's warm heart."

Observation confirms Muir's belief -- everything is going somewhere. If the act of going occurs in an infinite loop of cause and effect, perhaps the where in somewhere is immaterial

With a grasp of mortality, Muir compared our existential plight to that of trees and stars.

"Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars."

Muir recognized the apparent false contradiction of the creative and destructive forces in nature.

"By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs - now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life."

Muir saw the inherent beauty of constant change. He recognized creation and destruction is ongoing and unrelenting.

"Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another."

How do we reconcile our place amid constant change, creative destruction, and the ongoing, unrelenting flow of nature? It seems creation and destruction are the same dog chasing the same tail. Paul Coelho wrote,

"We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity."
- from The Alchemist

I suppose we are travelers, or accidental tourists, like rocks and birds or clouds and stars.

While we experience the journey of our lives, we are co-travelers on what Buckminster Fuller referred to as Spaceship Earth. We experience this journey as a glimpse of a grand and eternal show.

"This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on seas and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."
- John Muir, John of the Mountains (1938)